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The aim of this book is to show the importance of the earliest period of childhood for the development of basic emotional patterns of the personality. Some books on developmental psychology ignore or only pay cursory attention to this stage, as Diem-Wille points out, because the child belongs to private life, is cared for by his parents and has not yet come into contact with public child care institutions or schools. However, as psychoanalysis proceeds from the assumption that these years impart fundamental experiences, it is in the context of the first family relationships that the main underlying personality patterns emerge. It is these early experiences that are stored within the deepest layers of our mind. The author of the book is a training analyst with the Viennese Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytical Association for children, adolescents, and adults, and she is a pioneer in Austria using psychoanalytical observational approaches to training in the psychoanalytic and educational fields. Gertraud Diem-Wille is devoted to investigating the processes of psychological development in infants and young children and their family relationships and to understanding how underlying personality patterns emerge.
In a previous book The Early Years of Life: Psychoanalytical Development Theory According to Freud, Klein, and Bion (2011), the author used three types of material – observational, clinical, and theoretical – to expound her ideas. Her latest book is based on the same three sources and the book could be seen as a follow-up – deepening her ideas, demonstrating her great clinical and theoretical experience. She uses three children as case studies on the path from infancy to the fourth birthday. Two of these children are studied with the methods of longitudinal infant observation for 2 years. In a follow-up research study at the age of four, Diem-Wille examined whether the hypothesis about the observed infants corresponded with their furthe